Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. You're pregnant! What now? His sperm's hit the target. You've got a positive test result. And the excitement (or shock, depending on your initial reaction) is starting to sink in. But what now? Who should you tell and when? You should probably mention it to the baby's father. And you might want to let prospective grandparents or other close relatives and good friends in on the secret.

However, it's traditional to keep it largely to yourself for a while, probably because you then don't have to tell all and sundry if anything goes wrong in the more risky early months. This means that if you're ordinarily a heavy drinker or a girl who likes to let her hair down come the weekend, you'll have to think of lots of plausible reasons why you've switched to cranberry juice, or you're just not up for dancing until dawn. It was the abstinence that gave the game away in my case: walking into the pub, eight weeks gone with my first, I joined my girlfriends at the bar and requested a mineral water. Mouths dropped. A hush fell. 'Oh. My. God,' my good friend Alison responded.

'You're pregnant, aren't you?' You don't have to tell anyone at work for quite a long time yet. Technically you can keep it to yourself until up to 15 weeks before you're due, although practically, you'll probably need to spill the beans well before that - your bump is likely to start showing at some point in the first trimester (the first three months), and even before then, the fact that you keep dropping off at your desk, or disappearing to the toilet every 10 minutes will probably give the game away. There's loads more about coping with work and pregnancy in Chapter 5. Early symptoms How it feels - and how you'll look You don't get long to adjust to the idea: within just a few weeks of conception, the hormones start to fly, as the cluster of cells inside you settles down to begin its nine-month occupancy, and your body begins the first in a whole series of very normal and natural changes. The consequences of these changes range from mildly weird to downright ghastly, some kicking in before you've even seen the little pink line on the pregnancy test. For me, it was an intense tingling in the nipples that suggested something odd was afoot. Common giveaways are sensitivity to smells, a metallic taste in the mouth, and unexplained bouts of sobbing (get used to it - you may well find yourself a gibbering wreck for the next nine months).